Table of Contents:

• 4 Ideas for Improving Membership Retention with Your Web Site by C. David Gammel, CAE
• It’s Membership, It’s Data – How your AMS can help improve retention and recruitment by Carlos Restrepo, CAE
• Turning Membership into a Social Object by C. David Gammel, CAE
• Segmentation and Non-Member Data Management: Helping Your Staff Get More Familiar by "Talking to Strangers" by Kevin Whorton
• Retention Made Easy—20 Tips for Keeping Members by Scott Oser
• Tips for Web Site User Research by Dina Lewis, CAE
• The Avectra Academy Reading List
• Avectra Academy Updates

4 Ideas for Improving Membership Retention With Your Web Site

by David Gammel, CAE

1. Brand Members-only Content. Content on your site that is provided as a benefit of membership should be clearly labeled as such. Even after a member is logged in, make sure it is obvious when they are viewing content limited to members. This reinforces the value of membership throughout the year while they use the site.

2. Offer renewal at login for members near their expiration date. Given the possibilities of data integration between your web site and membership database, it is entirely feasible for your web site to know how soon membership expires for a member when they login. Use this data to remind the person to renew when they login. You could have an interstitial message show up offering to take them to renew now or continue on to the content they were attempting to access when the login occurred.
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It’s Membership, It’s Data – How your AMS can help improve retention and recruitment

By Carlos Restrepo, CAE

At the end of a recent presentation, my co-presenter and I were asked, “Everything you talked about today was non-dues revenue and I’m in membership, how does this help me?” My answer was “It all does.”

The presentation was “Using Data Strategically” and we were presenting on what data is and how it can impact an organization’s decisions. We classified data into 3 categories – Hard, Collected and Implied data. Many of the examples used were related to book sales, event registrations, surveys, etc. While it was true that we did not talk about membership products specifically, a key element of the presentation was the Retention Responsibility Curve (figure 1).
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Turning Membership into a Social Object

By C. David Gammel, CAE

A lot of social media strategies focus on creating social objects related to your organization that can be shared, modified and extended online by your members and other constituents. A “social object” is simply a piece of content that can be easily shared online and even be amended or changed by the people sharing it. For example, a photo posted to Flickr.com can be commented on by other users, submitted to groups on Flickr, have keywords added to it, posted to Facebook,  embedded in blog posts or web pages, and even have annotations attached to specific parts of the image.
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Segmentation and Non-Member Data Management: Helping Your Staff Get More Familiar by "Talking to Strangers"

By Kevin Whorton

In a recent panel I participated in regarding association memberships and the economic downturn, it was interesting to note that almost all of my advice and that of my colleagues fell into the same general category — data. Making better use of the data you have, identifying the gaps, then collecting and using the data you need become even more critical in a time when we need to do more with less. There are several reasons why this is the case:
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Retention Made Easy—20 Tips for Keeping Members

By Scott Oser

I think that all of us are now well aware that many associations are struggling financially.  What better time is there than now to really show your current members the value of membership and do everything you can to get them to renew.  This article is going back to the basics.  It is going to focus on a number of smart ways to focus on the core of your associations, membership retention.
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Tips for Web Site User Research

By Dina Lewis, CAE

Smart association executives don’t wait for a redesign project to improve their organizational website. As part of their Web strategy, they continually assess user needs and preferences and are proactive in offering content and tools to meet those needs. There is a variety of high value, low cost tactics you can use for ongoing Web site research. Three are described here.
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The Avectra Academy Reading List

Snippets and links to blog posts and other things we have been reading

• Don’t Silence Negative Word of Mouth – Drown it Out
  Good advice from Word of Mouth marketing guru Andy Sernovitz for all of us worried about bad word of mouth in our social media efforts
• Building Community the Mary Kay Way…
  Lessons to be learned from Mary Kay about Community Driven Marketing and building a passionate following. Applies to associations gaining members as well as companies gaining marketing share.
• What Staples Can Teach Associations in a Recession

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AVECTRA ACADEMY UPDATES